Sarah Jeong, a journalist trained as a lawyer at Harvard Law School, discusses the problem of “online harassment,†with various accounts of harassment that have made their way into mainstream media, as well as lesser-known ones. The Internet of Garbage considers why and how to recalibrate this ongoing project of garbage-removal from content platforms and social media networks. It’s not as simple as policing offensive material and hitting the delete button online: Jeong tackles precarious issues like free speech, behavior vs. content, doxing and SPAM.
“Algorithms are not designed in a vacuum, but rather in conjunction with the designer’s analysis of their data. There are two points of failure here: the designer can unwittingly encode biases into the algorithm based on a biased exploration of the data, and the data itself can encode biases due to human decisions made to create it. Because of this, the burden of proof is (or should be!) on the practitioner to guarantee they are not violating discrimination law.â€
There is a sense that technology is something separate from humanity, that it is free of our human flaws and foibles. Nothing could be further from the truth. The very human biases we have, conscious and unconscious, are infused into the technology we create. To claim otherwise is disingenuous and dangerous.
Yesterday, I deleted my six year old Reddit account. I’ve never been deep in the community side of Reddit. I managed one, extremely small subreddit, attended a couple local meetups, and that was it. Reddit was a place I relied on to get interesting news and links for me, and not much else. But, with every horror story in the media about the company: communities dedicated to sexualized images of teenage girls, pegging the wrong suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings leading to their suicide, The Fappening, I’ve grown more bothered by being a member. The recent double-punch of the racist and sexist attacks on now former CEO Ellen Pao, and the new CEO’s disinterest in even moderating the site’s grotesquely racist underbelly forced my hand. I wash my hands of Reddit.
Many pixels have been spilled about Reddit as a failed state. I will not attempt to repeat them. I’ll just link to a few of the best:
The problem is something much bigger than Reddit, and I go back to Charlie Warzel’s excellent piece. One line in particular stands out: “What we now see in Reddit is the crash of internet utopian idealism against the rocks of human reality.”
Or, as Arthur put it, less succinctly, but more accurately:
This is the face of Web 2.0, folks. This is the boondoggle they’ve been selling to all the Web 2.0 investors—that the “social web†is an untapped oil well when in reality it’s a seething underground pool of excrement and bile.
It’s all too easy to see Reddit’s failures, and the problems of the social web as a whole, on a small scale—as failures of technology and algorithms to surface the good things and hide the bad. If Reddit truly fails, that is, fails to make a return on investment for Advance Publications and its investors, some other enterprising, idealistic young rock star coder will figure out a better way and the experiment will begin anew. And will fail.
Anyone who knows me would tell you that I am, fundamentally, a cynic about human nature, but every cynic is a failed idealist at heart. My idealism about human nature has been crushed, again and again, throughout my life. A person can be good, but people, far too often, are cruel, callous, heartless, and outright evil. We’ve seen this play out many, many, many times on the Web. All you have to do is just look at the comments on any local newspaper’s website and you’ll see this in action.
The only thing that works, and has been shown to work time and time again, is strict, human moderation. If there’s one thing technology culture still does not get, the people around Reddit, especially, is that algorithms and systems can, and will be gamed. A post by returning Reddit CEO Steve Huffman summarizes this mistake—the idea that the unsavory elements of any community can be merely “quarantined” is pure nonsense.
Human moderation is, however, expensive. It comes at a high price for the company in terms of salary, and a high price for the moderators, on the front lines against the worst of what humanity has to offer from behind a keyboard. Just read the excellent Wired piece on the contract moderators Facebook pays to police your news feed. You can’t have it both ways. It’s impossible to engineer a community, let alone a safe one, it must be built by human hands and human action. It requires, it demands responsibility, and it must be baked in from the beginning. Any attempt at online community that neglects this is guaranteed to fall prey to the worst of what humanity has to offer.
What we’ve found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative — a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since.
John Gruber noted that Nilay’s post read an awful lot like one by Joshua Topolsky, five years ago. Plus ça change… Temporarily turning off comments is a band-aid on a tumor. Fixing the problem takes surgery, and to save the patient, you’re going to have to cut out a lot more than just the tumor. Too often, the attitude is to simply ignore the tumor under the guise of “inclusivity.” A line has to be drawn somewhere.
The cynic in me thinks the grand experiment of a social web is fundamentally misguided. To hell with it all. Drop a nuclear bomb on Reddit, wipe the content clean, and build something new in its place. In other words, turn Reddit into what Digg became—a human curated place where people can get interesting things from around the web without any of that pesky “community” nonsense. Of course, Digg is threatening to add “conversations, dialogue, and social features” to one of the few calm, peaceful places on the web. The idea makes me ill.
The idealistic side in me thinks someone (maybe Digg?) will realize that the lassiez-faire attitude of places like Reddit, 4chan, and all the other toxic communities on the web is what they need to avoid to succeed. But, of course, I have my doubts. I know in my heart of hearts that human nature, cliquish, horrible human nature will prove me right, when I want so desperately to be proven wrong.
For the past eighteen months, I’ve been working in medical journalism as a Web Producer. It’s an okay job, but I’m starting to get restless. The problem with most publishing, even in the specialities and trades, is that advertising rules everything. I’m just not satisfied with a job that prioritizes advertisers over a more important mission. So, I’m reaching out to my audience, in the hopes that I can find a decent job that lets me grow and learn while accomplishing great things. If you think that might be a job you know about, please read on.
That I have the job I’m in now is a testament to years of self-taught skills. I’ve been doing stuff on the Web since I was thirteen—more than half my life. It’s how I got a job with a Fintech startup, Trusted Insight. They took a chance, because I had a blog, a podcast, a social media presence, and I was willing to learn the trade. And learn I can, especially when I have a project. Heck, at my current job, I taught myself some VBA so I could speed up a recurring task in Excel when setting up new email lists.
If you’re in a specialized field, I can learn that quick. I went from no knowledge of institutional investment to managing a 65,000 member institutional investment community inside of a year. I went into medical journalism with no understanding of medicine, and now I know… stuff. Not as much as I learned at Trusted Insight, but I know a bit about the drug approval process with the FDA, about HIPAA guidelines, and the ACA.
Whatever you’re doing, I’ll learn, and pick it up fast.
Just one note: I’m not able to up and relocate right now, so I’d prefer if you’re either located in New York City, or you let people work remote. Either is fine, but I prefer to have an office to go to, if I can.
Second, a little about you.
You do work with a greater purpose—something that solves problems and makes the world better. Not just for people with money to burn and no patience (looking at you, “sharing economy†startups). I’ve got bigger picture stuff in mind: putting technology and the skill of how to use it in the hands of the disadvantaged—and getting them jobs—working to fix climate change, a broken government, or you just have a really cool app that helps a people in ways more interesting than summoning food, laundry, or a taxicab. You don’t have to be saving the world, just making people’s lives measurably better.
You’re also dedicated to solving problems and to making something truly awesome. You have people who show the passion they have for their work, and inspire each other to do better. I’ve been in too many offices where the work is just drudgery, and while every day can’t be one where you innovate, break through, and accomplish miracles, it would if we’re all in it together when there’s drudgery to be done. I’ve worked for a six-person startup, a multi-thousand employee international publishing company, a 25-person telesales and fundraising team, and in a 100-person government office. As long as I’m on a team that works tightly together, I can handle pretty much any size organization.
I’m a born fiddler, and in my computing setup, the one thing I fiddle with the most is my iPhone. I switch out apps, rearrange icons, and experiment with various home screen layouts for usability and aesthetics. The only thing that’s stayed the same for more than six months on my iPhone is the presence of Launch Center Pro and Drafts in my dock. Since my Sweet Setup interview, I’ve set up my iPhone in the style of CGP Grey, as explained on the first episode of Cortex. Each icon column is broken out by type of app. From left to right: communication, time and health, entertainment, and reading.
I’m not as ruthless about as CGP about what I allow on my device, but I am trying to be more conscientious about it. I’m also trying to move back towards Apple stock apps. Mail.app is much improved, and the native experience is great. If only there was a way to use gMail aliases with the built-in gMail support. Instead, I have to set up my personal mail as an IMAP account, and manually move messages around. While I try out Apple Music, it’s taken the place of Cesium on my home screen. I have mixed feeling about the service, and I don’t know if I’m going to be keeping it after the three month trial yet. Still, I bet Cesium will be there if I go back.
Since I’m switching back and forth between a Windows PC at work and my Mac and iOS devices everywhere else, I needed a cross-platform task manager. OmniFocus wasn’t fitting the bill, so I went with Todoist. I’m liking it enough that I sprang for the premium option, too. So far, it’s been the stickiest of the various task management tools I’ve tried. I can see why Federico Viticci likes it.
Another major change since the interview is in fitness apps. After the weaknesses of the Pebble as a fitness tracker became all too apparent, I had to rethink my fitness setup, and then do it again after I dropped Jawbone like a bad habit due to some bad software updates. I’m back to giving it a try for insights in my Apple Watch-tracked fitness, but it’s on probation. For caffeine tracking, I’m rolling with Caffiend, and I’m using Sleep Cycle and Power Nap for sleep tracking. And I’m also back into running, with the awesome, Sweet Setup approved Run 5k app. I’m in Week 7 now. I’m not doing any goal tracking, at the moment, though, as I’m not happy with any of the options out there, and I’ve tried almost all of them.
That’s about all the major changes since my Sweet Setup interview: organization, fitness, and no more Pebble. I told you I was a fiddler.
